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I love Tech football, but, as I told my GTAA contact this week, until there's a vaccine I wouldn't touch Grant Field with a ten-foot pole. He seemed to have heard that a lot recently.

As to the drug working: placebo effects or sheer unadulterated bum luck are probably the reason. That's why you do RCTs. This won't stop doctors from using it - they're desperate and they'll try anything - but it will make them think twice. As to it's effects: It is used very carefully even for...

I might add that just this kind of scenario is probably what will kill off football and basketball season this year. If the contact at practice doesn't get you, the weight room will. All it will take is one athlete at one major school. Provided that the schools decide to play in the first...

Thanks very much for posting this. I sent the original blog post to my list of family/friends that I send virus information. It's the best piece I've read so far on what kinds of environment to avoid and what to do to reduce chances of infection. Absolutely invaluable.

Well … that would be because we did flatten the curve to a good extent. Once you get hospital admissions under control, you can begin contact tracing and isolation by identifying the infected and those exposed. That can cut the transmission rate down enough to think about eradicating the virus...

You may be right about getting scared. COVID-19 hasn't been as big a problem in South Korea. One of the reasons they were able to mobilize so quickly was that they had a serious MERS outbreak, it scared them badly, and they got ready for the next time. Maybe we'll learn the lesson after this...

Here's the example used to use for military spending. How can we find out how many ICBMs we need to deter an attack by the Soviet Union? The answer is easy. We destroy ICBMs until the SU attacks us; then we know for sure! The obvious problem is that we would also have ~ 30M dead (if we were...

Remember when it was hard to get even one or two extra at the start of all this? If we had eaten the costs over the last decade and kept the stockpile up to snuff then the problem wouldn't have arisen in the first place. But … we have a lot of people who thought (I doubt they still do) that...

I completely agree. And that is a very difficult dance to learn to do right. That's why the largest concentration of expertise in the country is found in governments. Not, mind, that that is any kind of magic bullet; experts screw up just like the rest of us. But having someone who does it saves...

That's the whole point of a government. It's there to prepare for foreseeable events that private businesses won't take the risk to get ready for or that require investments larger than any financial business would underwrite. Of course, they are preparing for things that don't appear to present...

Did I hear you mention whining? Really? In this thread? Look at it. It is one big monster whine from start to finish. "The mean old government won't let me get a haircut!" "The mean old government won't let me lead a 'sensible' life!" "The virus isn't bad enough to justify infringing on my...

Let's suppose that you have a business that has been successful for years in the mail order business and has a chain of national stores. It come under attack from outside "investors" who buy the company out. They install one of their own as president and he decides he's going to "disrupt" things...

They did with this one. See: Michael Lewis. 2018. The Fifth Risk. New York: Norton. Everyone should read this book. Btw, the fifth risk is the one you run when you think only in terms of short run problems. The last sentence in the book: "It's what you fail to imagine that kills you." As we are...

In a national health crisis, the authorities will, of course, keep as much hospital capacity in reserve as possible. Thinking that you are out of the woods because you aren't in a New York style public disaster is … well, really stupid. That some hospitals in areas with low caseloads aren't at...

Well … if you had read the article carefully, you would see that it concerns results about both drugs, but that it concentrates on Roult's highly touted chloroquine study. The one that has been referenced here so often, iow. And, yes, that definitely is a Il Pluet de la Merde.

My bad again! I've got to quit doing this. One thing, however, that I should have said in the last post is that I see a lot of emphasis here on point estimates. It is certainly true that there is a lot of variation in those for COVID-19; it's brand new and we don't really know that much about...

Btw, on Didier Roualt and chloroquine: https://forbetterscience.com/2020/03/26/chloroquine-genius-didier-raoult-to-save-the-world-from-covid-19/ As the French say, Il pleut de la merde

That's because, if they are active well-reviewed scientists with long experience in their fields, they are. And, in fact, in both areas there is no such thing as "two sides". Some people here may be suffering from a Dunning-Kruger effect. (I won't say you. Yet.)

You missed the point. The basic epidemiology on a virus like SARS-Cov-2 is as well settled as the science of climate change. What is different about the virus is that we have less data available to analyze it. Hence, our predictions tend to be dicey. The risk is well established, however; the...

Well … journalists are responsible for most of that. (See: https://xkcd.com/882/.) Most of the public health officials and the professional epidemiologists give a range of estimates based on the models (most more sophisticated then the simple equation I gave) and the available data. Hence the...